Eddie Lopez in Tustin, California, in 2016. (Daniel Allott)
AS ELECTION DAY APPROACHED IN 2016, Eddie Lopez was mostly decided about how he would vote, but not quite. Eddie, who emigrated from Mexico to the United States thirty years ago, liked Hillary Clinton and was thrilled with the idea of casting his ballot for America’s first woman president. But Eddie had also been drawn to the Republican Party since the days of Ronald Reagan—his favorite president. And he’d grown wary of the Democratic Party under Barack Obama, who had failed to deliver on his promise to repair America’s broken immigration system. When election day arrived, Eddie couldn’t bring himself to vote for Donald Trump. “He just offends us too deep,” Eddie said, reflecting on how he and many of his fellow Latinos felt toward Trump.
Eddie is a builder and contractor who owns and manages several businesses in and around Orange County. His clients have included Hollywood entertainers such as Bradley Cooper and Jussie Smollett. I met Eddie on my first trip to Orange County in January 2018. I was staying at an Airbnb in Tustin, an upscale city that’s about a ten-minute drive from Disneyland. It was my first experience home-sharing, but certainly not my last. This would become a convenient way to meet people and learn more about the places I was visiting.
On my first night there, it happened that the house’s water heater broke. Eddie and his team were the ones who showed up to fix it. On the evening the repair work was being done, I was talking politics in the kitchen with my Airbnb hostess and her friends. Eddie offered his opinion, and then accepted my request for an interview. Eddie told me he was exasperated by Trump’s pledge to build a wall on America’s southern border. But what offended him most of all was Trump’s denigration of immigrants—particularly his campaign-launching claim about Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” It was little consolation to him that Trump had thrown in the obligatory, “And some, I assume, are good people.”1
Eddie Lopez in Tustin, California, in 2016. (Daniel Allott)
“I thought, ‘My son is thirteen years old. I have to do a lot of explaining to him,’” Eddie said. “We are not all rapists and drug dealers. I have to explain to my young son not to be ashamed of who we are.”
Eddie and his son cried during that conversation, and again on election night. “It was an emotional night,” he recalled. Still, when Trump won, Eddie held out hope that he would take a page from Reagan by enacting an immigration amnesty. “It’s too soon to hate him,” Eddie said he counseled his fellow Latinos as Trump took office.
Eddie Lopez highlights the dilemma facing Republicans in Orange County and other parts of America’s rapidly diversifying suburbs. Do they double down on Trumpism at the risk of alienating minority voters? Or do they try to steer clear of Trump while emphasizing the conservative values and policies that many of those voters support?
***
To appreciate the sudden political changes that have occurred in Orange County over the last two election cycles, one must first understand the gradual demographic changes that have occurred there over the last two generations.
On my second trip to Orange County early in 2019, I drove to Little Saigon in Westminster and adjacent Garden Grove, where nearly half the residents are Asian American. Strolling through the Asian Garden Mall one weekday evening, I didn’t see even one non-Asian face, aside from a black security officer.
I then drove a few miles east, to Santa Ana, the county seat. More than 90 percent of residents there are nonwhite, and the street signs are written in both English and Spanish.2 To walk down Calle Cuarto (Fourth Street) is to be transported to another part of the world. The street is lined with Latino jewelers and tax preparers, stands selling churritos, and more than a dozen bridal and quinceañera shops. Few of the people I tried to talk to spoke English. A storefront display featured a box set of “Ingles sin Barreras (English without Limits)” videos to help Spanish-speakers learn English. I asked the storeowner if the videos were selling well. He said they were not, which wasn’t surprising. Learning English is not necessary in a place where the law requires city council meetings to be simultaneously translated into Spanish. Even the cop writing me a parking ticket as I returned to my rental car initially addressed me in Spanish.
Later, while driving down coastal Highway 5 from Irvine to San Clemente, I counted at least sixteen AM stations on my car radio dial that featured non-English programming. Some were Spanish-speaking stations, while others I didn’t recognize—probably a mix of Vietnamese, Mandarin, Korean, and Tagalog, to cater to southern California’s large and expanding Asian and Pacific Islander communities.
Orange County reminded me of other growing, vibrant, diverse places I’d been, like my home base in Northern Virginia and the suburbs of Houston, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City—places, not coincidentally, that have turned from red to purple to blue in recent elections. Today’s Orange County is not the Orange County that birthed Richard Nixon or the one that was a bastion for the John Birch Society. It’s not the Orange County which in 1979 named its airport after native son John Wayne, an icon of rugged American masculinity and an outspoken Republican. It is not the lily-white Orange County that twice gave Ronald Reagan 75 percent of its votes for president.3 And it’s not the bleach-blonde Orange County of television shows like The Real Housewives of Orange County, The O.C., and Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County.
A view of the Pacific Ocean from San Clemente. (Daniel Allott)
Orange County’s population has more than doubled in the last fifty years, from 1.4 million people to nearly 3.2 million people. It is now more populous than twenty-one of the fifty states.4 In 1970, whites made up 86 percent of the county’s population;5 now they make up just 40 percent,6 which means that over 90 percent of Orange County’s population growth in the last half century has been nonwhite. That trend will continue: nonwhites comprise three of every four Orange County Public School students.7 Orange County is also younger and more highly educated than it once was. Much of its middle class has been driven away by California’s high cost of living. Many of the white Midwestern and Los Angeles transplants of a few decades ago have moved away to lower-tax, more business-friendly states such as Idaho, Colorado, Utah, and especially Texas.
In 2019, there was even a movement to rename the county airport after an old television interview resurfaced of John Wayne making racist remarks.8
There are still plenty of conservative corners of this thirty-four-city county—in moneyed places such as Newport Beach and San Clemente or in Yorba Linda, Nixon’s birthplace, where American flags are abundant and nary a “Hate Has No Home Here” yard sign can be found.
And Republicans continue to win at the local level. In the spring of 2019, the older, whiter voters who turn out in special elections propelled Irvine mayor Don Wagner to victory for a seat on the Orange County Board of Supervisors.9 “The Orange County comeback starts now,” Fred Whitaker, the Republican Party’s county chair, optimistically declared afterwards. But the trend is clear: Republican dominance has evaporated as Orange County has gotten more diverse. Donald Trump’s election has accelerated that trend. In 2016, Trump became the first Republican presidential nominee in eighty years to lose Orange County.10 In 2018, Gavin Newsom became the first Democratic gubernatorial candidate in forty years to win the county. That year, Democrats swept all seven US House seats in Orange County, including four that had been held by Republicans.11
If Republicans hope to regain control of the House in 2020, they’ll probably have to win back at least one or two of these seats.
Orange County Democrats used to kid that they could hold local club meetings in a telephone booth. But such modesty is no longer necessary. In fact, the mood was self-congratulatory one evening at an Aliso Niguel Democratic Club meeting that I attended. It was held not in a phone booth, but inside something nearly as obsolete—a Presbyterian church. New clubs like this one have been popping up across the county for the past few years. Upon arriving at the meeting, I introduced myself as a reporter to the club president, who then introduced me to various club office holders. An Asian American woman—the outgoing club president, I believe—asked me for the name of the publication I was writing for.
“The Washington Examiner,” I said.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she replied.
“Why?” I asked.
“That it’s not the Washington Post,” she responded, laughing.
The meeting was soon called to order. These progressives didn’t start their meeting with a prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance, as Republicans always do. Instead, a woman stood up and recited a very different sort of invocation. “We always want to focus ourselves before every meeting and remember why it is that we come together,” she started.
“It’s for social justice, to protect those who are vulnerable, support economic opportunities for all, work to protect the environment and elect Democrats who support these goals.”
“Amen?” I thought.
Then the church offering plates were deployed to collect party dues and some other club business was conducted. There were roughly fifty people in attendance—mostly an older and white crowd. I counted only four or five people of color and just a handful who looked under forty years old. This didn’t stop the club’s leaders from congratulating themselves on how diverse they thought they were. Inviting the club officers to assemble at the front of the room, they spent several minutes specifying the sex, race, ethnicity and sexual preferences of everyone standing.
After the meeting, I spoke with Ada Briceno, chairwoman of the Orange County Democratic Party.
“I’m sitting in churches with hundreds of people in them every night,” she said.
Briceno said that Democratic voter registration in the county had grown 40 percent since 2016, bringing them nearly on par with Republican voter registration numbers.
After the meeting, I drove an hour up the coast to meet a friend at Shannon’s Bayshore, a dive bar on Second street in Long Beach. The place was packed. As I waited for the bartender to fix my old fashioned, a middle-aged man whose name I didn’t catch struck up a conversation with me. He said he worked for the Port of Entry and was looking forward to retiring in six years. He said he couldn’t wait to leave California’s high taxes and move to Colorado or Texas, or even to Spain.
We started talking politics, and, inevitably, about President Trump. “He’s a son of a bitch,” the guy said. “But he’s getting the job done so far.” Then he walked off.
***
Some Democratic voters I spoke with worried that their leaders were steering the party in a direction that will cost them seats in 2020. “I’m very concerned that ill-informed people will be easily influenced by articulate people like (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and Bernie,” said Bob Bruce, a retired engineer I met at a Laguna Beach Starbucks. “For me, there’s progressive and there’s socialist. I’m not a socialist.”
Bruce felt that three or four Orange County seats that turned blue in 2018 could flip back to Republicans in 2020. He was particularly concerned about freshman Rep. Katie Porter, an Elizabeth Warren acolyte he liked and for whom he had volunteered. He worried that she was too liberal for her 45th congressional district, which had never previously been represented by a Democrat.
Orange County Republicans mostly blame their recent troubles on an unprecedented infusion of money into the 2018 races and the Democrats’ use of ballot harvesting. Ballot harvesting allows activists to collect sealed absentee or mail-in ballots on behalf of voters who failed to send them in time. In most states where ballot harvesting is legal, only family members or caregivers are permitted to harvest ballots, so as to prevent abuses. But California changed its rules ahead of the 2018 election to allow anyone to collect and submit ballots on behalf of others. Huge last-minute submissions of ballots delayed election results in several Orange County congressional races. All of them showed the Republican candidate ahead on election night, but the Democrat won once the ballots were all counted.12
Mission Viejo’s Republican mayor, Greg Raths, doesn’t believe ballot harvesting was much of a factor. “It’s bullshit,” he told me one evening at a Young Republicans mixer at a Del Frisco’s restaurant in Irvine. “We lost. Suck it up. I don’t like harvesting, but suck it up.”
“We got a problem here in Orange County,” said Raths, who subsequently declared his candidacy for Porter’s seat. “Instead of bitching and crying (about ballot harvesting). Go do it yourself. It’s legal.”
***
A couple of days later, I found myself back at the Airbnb in Tustin. The proprietor, Michelle, is an immigrant from Iran who retains her Farsi accent. She’s been very successful in real estate. In back of her palatial home, there’s an enormous swimming pool, a fireplace, a wet bar, a basketball hoop, and several fountains and marble statues. Most nights, a Tesla and three Mercedes can be found parked in her driveway. When I arrived, I joined Michelle in the living room. She was talking with a girlfriend whose name I didn’t catch. Soon, Michelle’s brother, Cyrus, and friend Lois joined us for a chat.
When we first met in 2018, Michelle, Cyrus, and Lois all told me they had voted for Barack Obama before turning to Donald Trump in 2016. All regretted voting for Obama, who they believed had harmed race relations, weakened the economy, and proved too weak on foreign policy. Michelle and Cyrus felt that Obama had blown an opportunity to help Iranian protestors during their short-lived Green revolution in 2009. In contrast, they all were pleased with Trump’s performance.
I was curious to see whether their views had changed after more than a year.
Anticipating my questions, Michelle volunteered that her support for Trump had gotten stronger over the last year, mainly due to the late 2017 tax cuts and the overall strength of the economy.
Michelle’s friend was more ambivalent. She had voted for Trump but had become weary of his behavior—the unhinged tweeting and continuing revelations about his sordid past. At the time, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had just admitted to paying off pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels to stay mum about an affair she claimed to have had with Trump. The friend said she liked Trump’s policies but was open to voting for another candidate, because she thought Trump was an embarrassment to the country.
Michelle, Cyrus, and Lois disagreed. All the vitriol targeted at Trump by the Left and the media, they said, had strengthened their support. “Honestly, they’ve put him through the wringer,” Michelle said.
Lois Morales in Tustin, California. (Daniel Allott)
I mentioned that Trump has some character flaws, but Lois took issue with that. “Look at the Clintons,” she said. “They got away with basically murder, and nobody is harassing them and showing such disrespect for the president. How does the world look at that?”
I asked Cyrus if he was happy with Trump.
“As far as the country, yes,” he said. “His personal life doesn’t matter to me because we didn’t elect a saint. He’s the president, and his personal life before is not relevant. Like this lady (Sen. Kamala) Harris. She had admitted she used marijuana and other things in college. It doesn’t matter.”
Cyrus said he believed Trump would “definitely” win reelection. He also predicted that Trump would engineer a peace deal between Iran and Israel, get the border wall built, and secure a peace deal with North Korea.
“I don’t think he’ll run again,” Lois interjected. “He’s already gotten done everything he set out to do.”
***
The waves of Asian immigrants who settled in California in the 1970s and ’80s identified strongly with the Republican Party, in part because of its firm stance against communism. George H. W. Bush won an estimated 55 percent of Asian American voters in the 1992 presidential election.13 But they have slowly been moving toward the Democratic Party in recent times.
“What we are seeing today is a generational divide,” said Linda Trinh Vo, who teaches Asian American studies at the University of California-Irvine. “The younger generation is more supportive of the Democratic Party.” The change has been quite pronounced. Depending on the survey, Trump won between 18 percent and 27 percent of the Asian American vote in 2016.14
More than 200,000 Vietnamese-Americans live in Orange County. Many have been angered by the Trump administration’s order to deport 7,000 Vietnamese refugees who committed crimes after arriving in the US. “There are still some people in our community that no matter what will support the Republican Party,” Vo said. “But (Trump) is alienating some Vietnamese Americans … including the older generation.”
Some California Republicans believe the party hasn’t done enough to reach out to immigrants and minorities. “The local party has dropped the ball with immigrant communities,” Tom Tait, a former two-term Republican mayor of Anaheim, told a reporter after the 2018 elections.15 Others pin the blame on Trump specifically. Republican Young Kim said she would have won her race for California’s 39th congressional district seat if Trump had not engaged in “so much anti-immigrant rhetoric.”16
In a possible sign that some California Republicans want to chart a subtle path away from Trump, delegates to the state convention in February 2019 elected Jessica Patterson to lead their party. The thirty-eight-year-old Latina was chosen over Travis Allen, a loud Trump-defender. But not everyone was pleased. Raths said he received blowback when he posted a congratulatory message to Patterson on his Facebook page. “Man, I got blasted,” he said. “‘She’s part of the establishment! She’s not the right person!’ So people didn’t appreciate her. A lot of the grass roots were Travis Allen fans.”
***
With Trump as their standard-bearer, Republicans may be losing an opportunity to reach many immigrant voters. But as Democrats embrace increasingly socialistic policies that remind them of the regimes they fled, he could have an opportunity to gain at least some of their support. I met some of them one sunny Saturday afternoon in February 2019, when I wandered into a phone bank organized by Orange County Republicans for Don Wagner. Wagner was the mayor of Irvine who was running in a special election for Orange County supervisor. When I arrived, I noticed that several Asians seemed to have taken lead roles in organizing the phone bank. One who immediately approached me was Saga Zhou.
A few days later, I interviewed Zhou, who had moved to the United States from China in 2009. Upon arriving, Zhou steered clear of politics. The Communist Party rules supreme in China, so most Chinese immigrants bring a built-in aversion to political involvement. “Politics was a joke to me,” she said. But Zhou’s interest in politics increased as she began to see the American Left embracing policies that reminded her of those she’d fled in China. One such policy was the Left’s support for late-term abortion. When she lived in China, Zhou, like many young Chinese, didn’t consider abortion to be a big deal. Her view changed after moving to America, getting married, and bearing two children.
“After I became a mother, my understanding about life fundamentally changed,” she said, becoming emotional. “Now I am totally a mother.”
Zhou said her heart broke upon learning about a Virginia bill to loosen restrictions on late-term abortions. Appearing on a radio show as the bill was being debated, Democratic Governor Gary Northam pledged to sign the legislation, even suggesting that it would sanction infanticide.17
“Oh, when I saw the news, I cannot even open it (the article),” Zhou said through tears. “It was really hard. I just felt something really strong into my chest. And then I said, ‘Let me adopt him, don’t kill him.’” Hearing this story prompted Zhou and her husband to consider adoption. The proposed law hit especially close to home for Zhou, whose mother had become pregnant with her just as China’s government began implementing its brutal One Child policy. The policy prohibited most couples from having more than one child. Women who became pregnant with a second child were often forced to undergo sterilization; sometimes their babies were killed in the womb. Though she was her mother’s second child, Zhou escaped death because the One Child policy was not yet being implemented in her city.
Saga Zhou at a Panera Bread in Irvine. (Daniel Allott)
“Somebody has to understand the roots, where these policies come from,” said Zhou, whose maternal grandparents were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. “That’s why I’m so pissed. I finally found a country that I think I can truly settle down to enjoy my ideals, to do my best to achieve the most. But now you are coming here to destroy it and force me to leave. Why the heck is that? So I was so mad. Damn socialism. Why are you chasing me?”
In 2018 and 2019, as Democrats began to embrace policies such as Medicare for All, “free” college, 70 percent tax rates, the Green New Deal, and late-term abortion, Republicans saw an opportunity to frame the 2020 election as a referendum on socialism. President Trump began including a riff on the dangers of socialism in most of his speeches. “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” he told Congress and the nation in his 2019 State of the Union address.18
An internal memo from the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, discussed its plan to win the suburbs and retake the House of Representatives by framing the 2020 election as a choice between socialism and economic opportunity.19 The Republican Party’s anti-communism has long attracted many Cubans, Vietnamese, Eastern Europeans, and other immigrants who fled communist countries during the Cold War.
Chinese immigrants have historically been an afterthought, but their numbers are rising. There are more than three million Chinese immigrants living in America today, up from fewer than half a million in 1980.20 And as their numbers grow, Chinese Americans are becoming more active in politics. In 2014, a group of Chinese Americans in Orange County formed The Orange Club (TOC), a political action committee whose purpose was to prevent a ballot referendum, Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 5, to lift the ban on affirmative action in state university admissions. The club argued that the change would unfairly hurt their high-achieving children’s chances of getting into California’s top state-run universities. The measure ultimately failed, due in part to strong opposition from Asian American groups including The Orange Club, which remains active in local public policy debates and endorses candidates for office.
Zhou joined TOC in 2018, and ever since she has been attending meetings, signing online petitions, and protesting at public events—all things she couldn’t have imagined doing in China.
In 2008 and 2012, many Chinese American voters cast their presidential ballots for Barack Obama, believing Obama’s Democratic Party was more hospitable to immigrants. “On the first day when we land here, the media and Left reinforce the concept that minorities and immigrants are supposed to vote for Democrats and not supposed to be aligning with conservatives,” said George Li, a Chinese immigrant I met at a Starbucks in Irvine. But many Chinese-Americans are repelled by the Democrats’ more recent embrace of policies they consider to be socialistic. Socialism “is a great, great concern to (Chinese Americans), which is why I’m really motivated to stop that,” Li said. “It’s our duty.”
As a college student in China in the late 1980s, Li was active in China’s democracy movement and knew some of the students involved in the Tiananmen Square protests. Not long after, Li moved to the US, earning a master’s degree in computer information systems and starting a family. Li became active in local politics through The Orange Club, which he led in 2018. Li believes the Republican Party is a natural fit for Chinese-Americans. Traditional Chinese culture is conservative, he said, emphasizing hard work, independence, education, and family values. He finds the Left’s obsession with political correctness maddening because it intimidates people into silence. “This intimidation is so bad for freedom of speech,” he said. “A lot of things I see in this country are very similar to what I saw in the Cultural Revolution era in China,” He calls political correctness a “form of cultural Marxism.”
Benjamin Yu, also of Irvine, saw the Democratic Party moving toward socialism long before some of its members began embracing the term. Yu immigrated to the US with his mother in the late 1990s. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Yu, then a US Green Card holder, felt a “surge of patriotism” for his new home, prompting him to join the US Army.
“When something happens so close to you, it doesn’t matter if you are an American by legal status,” he said. “You get a sense that that’s your country. You feel part of the community.”
Yu saw a nascent socialism developing under President Obama, for whom he voted twice before turning to Trump in 2016. He believes that more and more Chinese are voting Republican, although he thinks many are reluctant to say so for fear of being ostracized.
Zhou, Li, and Yu believe Republicans can win over Chinese American voters by emphasizing the Democrats’ embrace of socialism and the GOP’s staunch opposition to it.
“I just want America to be America,” Li said, “not another Soviet Union, Cuba, or China.”
***
Orange County Republicans may be able to attract some immigrant voters to their party by emphasizing the Democratic Party’s leftward turn. The problem is that Trump’s hardline immigration stance and combative rhetoric alienate many other immigrants who would otherwise be open to a Republican message. Trump is also alienating white voters who care about immigrants. In fact, the president seems to be turning some Republicans into Democrats. Two former Republicans—Harley Rouda and Gil Cisneros—beat incumbents to win congressional races in Orange County in 2018. They did so running as Democrats disillusioned by the direction of their former party under Trump.
Bob Bruce is a former Republican whose political views changed after he moved to Orange County and began to appreciate the diversity he didn’t encounter growing up in segregated Chicago.
“What’s interesting, my daughter is married to a Persian guy,” Bruce said. “He’s not a Muslim, but his parents are, and they’re not jihadists, you know? So when someone starts dissing the Muslims, it kind of hits home a little bit. It’s like, my granddaughter, who I love to death, her other grandparents are Muslims!”
Orange County has clearly changed Bruce, a well-educated white retiree who voted for both Reagan and George H. W. Bush for president. “On my block, there’s an Indian family, an Asian, a guy from the South, a couple of Jewish families. If you’d said twenty-five years ago that I was going to live here, I’d say you were crazy. And I love it. I love it. It’s changed my own views, my politics. I’ve changed my outlook.”
“It’s the diversity and the vibrancy,” he said of what he loves most about living in Orange County.
The vibrancy gap between Republican places and Democratic places is real, and it’s widening. As suburban counties like those outside Washington, DC, Houston, Atlanta, and Los Angeles are becoming more diverse and more economically and culturally vibrant, they’re trending Democratic. According to data from the Brookings Institution, in 2008 the real GDP per Republican House district was $33.3 billion.21 In 2018, it fell slightly to $32.6 billion. In Democratic House districts, the average real GDP increased nearly 50 percent, from $35.7 billion to $49 billion. In that time, median household income per district has increased 17 percent in Democratic districts and fallen 3 percent in Republican districts. Similar trends are found in education and productivity patterns. This has happened as Democrats have become more powerful in cities and tech hubs, and Republicans have gained ground in rural areas heavy in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing.
Other Orange County residents I met echoed Bruce’s sentiments on diversity.
At a Laguna Niguel coffee shop, Lacey, a thirty-five-year-old nurse, told me it was Orange County’s mix of cultures that brought her back after living in Colorado for several years. “I love how diverse it is here,” she said. “Even as a kid, everyone would always say how much of a melting pot SoCal is, and you don’t understand that until you leave SoCal. When I went to Colorado, I was literally the kid of color.”
Half-white and half-Hispanic, Lacey is the type of voter both parties desperately want, and she knows it. “I’m the educated female who is multi-national who refuses to be a Democrat or a Republican because both of them have their heads in their ass,” she said. After twice voting for Barack Obama for president, Lacey voted for Trump in 2016 mainly because she couldn’t stand the thought of Hillary Clinton becoming America’s first female president. “There’s an exalted-ness to the title of the first female president,” she explained. But she thinks that by framing immigration as a moral issue instead of an economic one, Trump has revealed himself to be “a racist bigot.” Lacey voted for Trump as the lesser of two evils, knowing he’d likely be president for only one term. “How much can he literally fuck things up in four years?” she thought. “We need a change anyways.”
“Trump being president, we knew exactly what would happen. Shit was going to hit the fan. We knew things were going to get shook up. That’s what people wanted. … Sometimes you need a little anarchy to reset things.
“That’s why I’m not looking for him to be a two-term president…. It’s not bad to shake things up and wake people up and help people start paying attention. I told my parents, we’ve been through the thunderstorm, now maybe a light drizzle would be good.”
Lacey said she will not be supporting Trump again in 2020. She will either vote for the Democratic nominee or not vote at all.
***
According to the Pew Research Center, Hispanics will become the largest group of minority voters in 2020.22 How crucial will Hispanic voters be? If Trump can improve his performance with this voting bloc by 12 percentage points, he’ll be poised to win swing states such as Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona, be competitive in Colorado and Nevada, and be close to a sure thing for reelection.
Hispanic Democrats are more moderate than most Democrats. According to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, Hispanics comprise 12 percent of self-described Democrats while making up 22 percent of Democrats who describe themselves as moderate or conservative. In other words, a significant portion of Hispanic Democrats are not woke socialists who support abortion-on-demand, open borders, and the Green New Deal. Many are like Eddie Lopez, a Reaganite Republican who just cannot bring himself to vote for Trump because he offends him too much. Republicans seem to understand that they must reach out to these voters. They talk about it all the time. But they never seem to know how.
On a spring morning in 2019, a group of fifty or so mostly retired white Republican women gathered in Fullerton to listen to two millennial Latina guest speakers point the way. The event was held in a room at the back of a buffet restaurant. “I’ve been waiting all month for this,” a woman said as she hustled past me looking for a chair in the packed room. One thing that struck me about the meeting was that the American flag was placed prominently in the front of the room, and a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance were solemnly recited, a stark contrast to the Democratic meeting I’d attended a few days earlier. First up was Jazmina Saavedra. A handout with her biography touted her work history as a purveyor of anti-aging products, a solar-energy entrepreneur, and a 2018 US Senate candidate.
“Every time I get invited to a Republican club, I just see white people,” Saavedra began. “I’m sorry.”
That comment was met with silence in the room. But Saavedra recovered with lines like, “I never call this country my second country. This is my first country”; “Hispanics are Republicans, they just don’t know it yet”; and “The wall is a message of love to the American people.”
At this last line, I turned to an eighty-five-year-old woman sitting next to me, named Claudia, and asked for her thoughts on why the county had turned blue. “The Latinos,” she said.
“Can they be won over?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Is it worth trying?”
“I hope it is. I guess we’ll see.”
Claudia was in a talkative mood, and I was there to listen. She said she felt like a hypocrite because her church supports LGBT pride, which she cannot abide. She told me she wants a border wall and is definitely pro-life. “I just can’t go with this late-term abortion,” she said. She insisted that though she’s been involved in Republican politics her entire life, she’s not an extremist. She said she appreciates what Trump is doing for the country but that “his personality drives me up the wall.”
“How do other women feel?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, we all hate his personality,” she said. But she stressed that her friends are also focused on what he’s doing for the country.
“Nobody’s perfect,” she said.
Next up at the podium was Elsa Adeguer of Latinos 4 Trump (not to be confused with “Latinos for Trump”), who delivered a testimonial about fleeing violence in Latin America to come to the US. She explained that she was drawn to Trump because, like her, he’d once supported abortion but is now pro-life.
Both women elicited the most applause when they assured their audience that they had done things “the right way” by entering the US legally.
A few days later, I drove to the City National Grove of Anaheim, where hundreds of people were standing in line, waiting to do things the right way.
Orange County Republicans had set up a registration tent outside the arena on a day when it was hosting a series of naturalization ceremonies. “Come with patriotism and enthusiasm as we welcome and register our new members at our Republican Booth,” an online invitation said. But here in Anaheim, any welcoming would have to be done from afar, as the half-dozen or so Republican volunteers had been penned off in a “free speech zone.” They were reduced to shouting “Thank you for registering!” And “You’re doing the right thing!” to bemused passersby who, unfortunately for the activists, weren’t their target audience. The new citizens were standing in a line on the opposite side of the arena.
One of the activists said she’s often there all day and is lucky to register ten people. During my hour there, just one person registered. With the dearth of registrants, the activists were more than happy to chat with me, so long as I promised not to print their names. I asked them what Orange County Republicans needed to do to win over immigrants. “We need to convince people we don’t have horns on our head,” one woman said.
“We need to emphasize faith,” said a second. “And no open borders.”
“I would not take 2018 as gospel that everything has changed,” the first added.
The two women blamed ballot harvesting for Democrats’ success in 2018. They said they were certain Democratic volunteers simply filled out people’s ballots for them. I asked them why Republicans don’t harvest ballots too.
“We tried to harvest,” one of the women said. “We got like ten.” Republicans prefer to physically take in their ballots, she explained, not trusting them to some volunteer who comes by their home. “Republicans don’t trust.”
“It’s like marrying a woman you’ve never met,” added a male volunteer who was listening in.
I asked them whether President Trump makes their job harder.
“No! In fact, he emboldens me!” the second woman said.
“We all love Trump. We’re glad he tweets. But some in the Republican Party think we should be more like Democrats,” said the first. She mentioned Jessica Patterson, whose name elicited sighs and head shakes from several of the volunteers.
“We don’t want to be politically correct,” said the second. “We have to get people to look at policy instead of personality, facts instead of feelings.”
***
But personality and feelings matter, too, for better and for worse. After all, it was Trump’s no-holds-barred personality that originally attracted many Americans who felt forgotten by politically correct, establishment politicians. But that same personality drove away the likes of Eddie Lopez, Bob Bruce, and, eventually, Lacey—the types of voters Republicans will need to win consistently again in Orange County and places like it.
When I visited Lopez again in March 2019, I asked him to assess President Trump’s performance at the mid-point of his first term. He gave Trump a 5 out of 10 on policy, mainly for presiding over a strong economy and enacting tax and health care reforms that have benefited Lopez’s businesses and employees. He reiterated that he supports more of Trump’s agenda than he opposes, and that he hopes Trump will set aside his obsession with the border wall and grant illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship. “He’s the only guy who can do it at this point,” he said. “And he’s crazy enough that it just might happen.”
If it does happen, Lopez said, he thinks Republicans will begin to win majorities of Latinos, whose religiosity, social conservatism, and support for free enterprise are a natural fit for the party. Short of that unlikely scenario, Lopez will be voting for the Democratic nominee next November. He thought former Vice President Joe Biden was the only candidate who could defeat Trump. “Biden can get into a street fight with Trump and win,” he said.
I asked Lopez whether he still thinks it’s too soon to hate Trump.
“Yes, the only thing that gives us reason to hate him is what he said about my race,” he said. Then Lopez paused, and added, “To really hate him, that would make me part of the extremism that he created.”
***
On January 3, 2020, a US drone strike near the Baghdad International Airport killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. Soleimani had led Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and was commander of the Quds Force, which the United States considers a terrorist organization. Iran responded by launching a series of missile attacks on US bases in Iraq, which produced no casualties. The killing of Soleimani escalated tensions between the two countries, raising the specter of a new war in the Middle East. Donald Trump was at risk of becoming the wartime president he vowed never to be.
A few days later, I was back at the Airbnb in Tustin, speaking with three Iranian-Americans—Michelle, her brother Cyrus, and Cyrus’s wife, Roya. All three approved of Trump’s decision to take out Soleimani. They also repeated their disappointment that President Obama hadn’t supported the Green movement protestors in Iran in 2009.23 “He supported the government of Iran—it’s his fault,” Roya said of Obama and why the Green Revolution failed. Roya believes any Democratic president would back the repressive regime in Tehran over the pro-democracy opposition. “They scare us,” she said of how Iranian-Americans feel about the Democratic candidates. All three were certain Trump would win reelection, and that he would do so with the help of Iranian-American voters.
“Why are you so sure?” I asked.
“He’s kept his promises,” Cyrus said. “It’s that simple.”
I asked the group whether they knew any Iranian-Americans who hadn’t voted for Trump in 2016 but planned to in 2020.
“I didn’t vote for him last time, but I will this year,” Roya announced. “I’ve never voted before in twenty-five years, but I’m scared. I’m scared of what the Democrats would do in Iran.”
***
Two developments in 2019 boosted Orange County Democrats’ prospects heading into the 2020 elections. In February, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to eliminate traditional polling places, replacing them with hundreds of voting centers and drop-boxes located across the county, and automatically sending every registered voter a mail ballot. All voters will be able to drop off their ballots at any of the voting centers as early as ten days before election day.24 A new state law also lets people both register to vote on election day and cast a ballot at any vote center. Earlier and easier access to voting is seen as an advantage for Democrats, who typically have a harder time getting their supporters to vote.
Then, in August 2019, the number of registered Democrats surpassed the number of registered Republicans in the county for the first time.25 It was a moment that crystalized the long-term demographic shifts occurring in Orange County.
A third factor—President Donald J. Trump’s presence at the top of the ballot—may prove crucial in determining whether Democrats retain the four House seats they flipped in 2018. Democrats seem convinced Trump will be an asset to them. I attended several local Democratic Party meetings during my January 2020 trip. I came away with the impression that Democratic activists believe Trump’s unfitness for office has become so obvious that they don’t need to talk very much about their own candidates or policies to succeed. But not every Democrat I talked to saw Trump as an obvious drag on down-ballot Republicans. When I met up with Bob Bruce again, he said he’d seen a difference in the way his neighbors were responding to Trump. In 2018, many of the voters in the upscale beach neighborhoods where he canvassed for Katie Porter responded positively to the anti-Trump message. But suddenly, things were different.
Now when you go and you talk to the same people about anti-Trump, they’re looking at their 401K, they’re looking at the fact that their kid’s got a job, they’re looking at the fact that things are okay. The world didn’t collapse, we’re not at war. … So now the people who were Republican who didn’t support Trump before because they abhorred his actions are going to say, “You know what, I’m going to forget that. I can take four more years of this.”
Bruce said even his own opposition to Trump had softened over the last year or so. “I never thought I would say this, but this guy could win again,” Bruce said, looking somewhat surprised by what he was saying. “Our current president could win again in November. And that’s saying a lot because when we spoke last year, I was convinced he wouldn’t even run again.” Bruce put the odds of a Trump victory at 55 percent.
Bruce arrived at that conclusion after seeing the ideological fracturing within the Democratic Party while attending two state party conventions in 2019. Bruce complained about the party’s continuing leftward shift. “If it’s Bernie, forget it, it’s over. If it’s Elizabeth (Warren), it’s over,” said Bruce, a former Republican. He added that if either of these candidates becomes the nominee, Trump would be able to tar them with the “socialist” label. He also said that if the nominee is Sanders or Warren, he himself might vote for a third-party candidate.
Bob Bruce in Laguna Beach, California in 2020. (Daniel Allott)
Lacey, the former Trump voter, said something similar when I met with her again. “If it’s Warren or Bernie, I won’t vote,” she said. “I could do Biden or Buttigieg—Yang too.”
I asked her if there was anything Trump could do to win back her support. She said there was not. “I happen to agree with some of the things he does,” she said. “I also think he’s a racist and a bastard.” Lacey supported impeaching and removing Trump from office. But, interestingly, she said she still wouldn’t change her 2016 vote if she could. That’s because her vote for Trump was a vote against Hillary. Also, she said, “I think we needed the thunderstorm,” applying the same metaphor she had shared with me a year earlier to describe Trump’s election. “But with so much hate in the world right now, we could use a period of calmness.”
Another factor that will help Democrats in 2020 is the increasing share of the electorate composed of racial minorities. Latinos now make up 21 percent of Orange County voters, up more than a third since 2016.26
Before leaving Orange County, I chatted with Eddie Lopez one last time. I met him at one of his businesses, in an industrial park in Paramount, just north of the Orange County border with Los Angeles County. A year earlier, Eddie was convinced Joe Biden was the only candidate who could beat Trump. “Biden can get into a street fight with Trump and win,” he had said in 2019.
Now Eddie had significant doubts about Biden, who he said looked weak and past his prime in the debates and on the stump. “He used to be more faster and sharper and accurate,” Eddie said. “I think right now, he’s doing a lot of damage.”
On the economy, Eddie thought Trump was “a fucking blessed motherfucker,” benefiting from a strong economy he inherited from Obama. Eddie was convinced that the economy would tank, but not until 2021.
Eddie also said he was bothered by his suspicion that his two older sons, who are in their late 20s, voted for Trump in 2016 and still support the president. He attributes their admiration for Trump to their being born in the US and their inability to share their father’s empathy for the immigrant struggle. Eddie was sure Trump would win reelection, and was concerned about what will happen when he does.
“Can America survive four more years of Donald Trump?” I asked.
“Maybe in the next ten years we will see all that this guy’s (done) outside the country and inside the country with the economy and with the way there’s so much anger,” Eddie said. “Right now, we’re inside the bubble, so we’re not exposed to it. We can’t see all of it yet. But one day, we will look back and understand all the damage this guy has done.”